Great Apes!http://greatapes.ca/blog
Sometimes I write about things other than hockeyWed, 27 Dec 2017 15:40:01 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.9Music of 2017http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/music-of-2017/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/music-of-2017/#respondWed, 27 Dec 2017 15:40:01 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=1123When I sat down to put this list together I was impressed by just how much great music was released in 2017. I’ve limited this list to 15 albums for the sake of brevity, but I easily could have listed more, and I’m sure there are even more good albums that I don’t know about yet. I’m pretty bad at describing why I like this album or that album, so I’m just going to list them in order and embed a song from each record that I hope you’ll like. Like most years this list does lean towards metal albums, especially near the top end, but I think there’s a pretty good variety of genres here, and a good mix of vocal and instrumental albums. Enjoy!

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/music-of-2017/feed/0Games of 2017http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/games-of-2017/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/games-of-2017/#respondSun, 24 Dec 2017 19:09:10 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=1101There were a lot of games released in 2017, so many that there are still probably 8-10 games that came out that I want to play that I haven’t gotten around to, and I probably never will get to some of them. Thankfully, many of the games that I did play turned out to be quite good.

These days the toughest question I have to deal with when putting out this list is figuring out what exactly constitutes a game that was “released” in 2017. On some level the days of going to a store and buying a disc or cartridge that contains the final version of a game is over. This list includes one game that’s still in Early Access, another game that was in EA for a couple of years but finally saw its official “release” this summer, and a game that was released episodically throughout 2016 but wasn’t put together as a complete retail package until January. Then there’s something like No Man’s Sky, which was so thoroughly changed through free DLC this year that it’s practically a new game. I didn’t include it since it was already my #2 game last year, but it’s an interesting question.

One big difference between this year and most other years I’ve done this list is that this year there aren’t nearly as many indie games. In previous years I’ve had games with small budgets but great ideas at or near the top of the list, with Game of the Year honours going to things like The Banner Saga or Papers, Please. I couldn’t say why that is, but for whatever reason this year’s list is dominated by games from big publishers.

I make no claim to having an exhaustive list of the “best” games of 2017. I counted about 25 games that I played enough of this year to form an opinion, but there are plenty more I haven’t played and would like to (I hear Yakuza 0 is a lot of fun), or games that I started and enjoyed but got distracted from before I could decide how much I liked them (like Thimbleweed Park). So these are just the ten games I got the most enjoyment out of this year.

10. Assassin’s Creed: Origins

Assassin’s Creed: Origins is the most Video Games video game of 2017. It’s a platformer with an RPG levelling system, combat at least vaguely inspired by Dark Souls, equipment divided into blue/yellow/purple coloured tiers in the way that World of Warcraft pioneered, a completely extraneous crafting system, quest design that seems to be trying to mimic The Witcher 3, fortresses that seem pulled from Far Cry, and an enormous open world that you can ride through on horseback. It seems determined to continually pull you out of the experience with reminders that this is software-as-a-service just as much as it’s a single-player game, that you can always spend more money, and maybe could you spend some more money?

And yet despite all that, there’s nothing in the game that is especially bad either. All of its components are competently executed (except the crafting, I think, which is just a lazily designed time sink). It is, on a technical level, extremely impressive. The sheer number of unique art assets in the game is absolutely staggering, virtually all of them at an impressive level of detail and quality. They’ve also fixed some of the problems that recent incarnations of Assassin’s Creed have had; for example, they finally got rid of the god forsaken instant fail stealth sections. And in general the moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty fun. It’s almost never a bad game, but it’s never really a great game either. It’s pretty good, but unremarkable. And there is just way, way, way too much of it, and it makes me sad that we’re never going to get a really clever, tightly focused Assassin’s Creed (like AC2) again.

9. Fire Pro Wrestling World

Fire Pro Wrestling is not a game that everyone, even every wrestling fan, will enjoy. It’s completely lacking in terms of presentation, has very few match types to choose from, and features no real wrestlers (though it’s got a great character creator and it’s easy to download real wrestlers that other people have created). It also has no story or career mode, although they are apparently planning to add one in January. What it is good at is being a game about wrestling matches.

One thing Fire Pro captures that other recent wrestling games haven’t is the flow of a match. Grapples are divided into weak, medium, and strong, and at the beginning of each match anything other than a weak grapple will be countered. After a couple of minutes of wearing an opponent down you can start to execute medium grapples, and a few minutes later you might be able to land a big move. Strikes follow this formula too: early on you’re unlikely to land a large strike like a clothesline or a dropkick, but a simple jab or chop is a lot easier to land. It even includes some of the fun little moments that wrestling matches often contain, like tests of strength and back-and-forth strike exchanges.

This means that every match has a real flow to it that roughly follows what you’d expect from a real (fake) wrestling match, with the early going being a back and forth of quick strikes, simple throws, and wear-down holds, progressing into bigger and more damaging moves, eventually building up to landing signature strikes and finishing moves. If you can put up with a game that doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles but does have excellent in-ring action, this one’s worth picking up.

8. The Long Dark

The Long Dark is ostensibly a “survival” game, but it bears little in common with games like Don’t Starve that probably come to mind when someone mentions the genre. While The Long Dark does have hunger and thirst meters, as well as crafting, it’s actually a fairly gentle game once you get the hang of how it works. It’s relatively easy to have a single game that runs for several hours unless you stumble into a really unfortunate situation, like getting mauled by a bear.

Instead, The Long Dark is a much quieter and more contemplative game about trying to eke out an existence for yourself, alone in the frigid Canadian wilderness. I’m having a bit of difficulty describing what I particularly like about this game because it succeeds not in big moments, but in small ones. Walking up over the crest of a hill to find a cabin that will be safe and warm to sleep in overnight as the temperature drops. Trekking through a snow-covered, wind-swept valley in search of new horizons to uncover. Staring out at an aurora late at night (but not for too long, because you’ll freeze to death). Warming up with a mug of tea and a new pair of mittens. The Long Dark is a game that succeeds not as a series of challenges or systems to master, but as an experience of the feeling of particular place and circumstance.

7. Dead Cells

This is the first time I’ve included a game on one of my year end lists that isn’t even finished yet (it’s still in Early Access), but Dead Cells is already a well-tuned game with a lot of content to play through. It bills itself as a Metroidvania, but I think it’s better to think of it simply as an action-platformer that happens to have randomly generated levels. It’s a game that feels great to get better at, to push yourself to reach new levels and progress further along. The moment-to-moment combat is incredibly satisfying, with a wide variety of weapons to use, each of which handles differently and has different attributes. At this point the game seems to be largely feature-complete, with the major changes being new content and balance fixes. I’m looking forward to seeing where the developers take it.

Horizon: Zero Dawn was the best photography simulator I played in 2017. It has absolutely gorgeous environments and a great photo mode, which I used to take something like 200 screenshots (the above image is one I took, and I shared some of my other favourites here). As a game H:ZD is a bit more of a mixed bag. I thoroughly enjoyed the combat mechanics – taking on the robotic dinosaurs that also happen to comprise the game’s central narrative mystery is great fun. And thankfully that excellent combat is the primary thing you’ll be doing in the game. It’s also a joy to explore the world, thanks to the great environments.

But it also suffers from many of the same problems that Assassin’s Creed Origins does, in that it is a very Video Games video game. There’s a lot of extraneous fluff that distracts from the parts of the game that I enjoyed the most. It’s way too big, it offers too many pointless quests, it has a needlessly complicated item system, throws in a largely unneccessary crafting system, and so forth. The writing is also not particularly good, and for the love of God, please stop using audio logs to deliver narrative.

Thankfully, the things Horizon does well it does very well, and so it was a game I had a lot of fun playing, even though it would have been better if it was more focused and about 10 hours shorter.

5. Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider

Death of the Outsider is the expansion/sequel to a game that I think is criminally under-rated, Dishonored 2 (I had D2 as my 3rd best game of 2016, and the only reason it wasn’t higher is because two of my favourite games of the past decade also happened to be released last year). Death of the Outsider takes place in the same world, even borrowing a couple of levels, and it’s more of what Dishonored 2 was so great at. It creates a series of interlocking systems and open-ended quests that really reward you for exploring, experimenting, and understanding how the game world functions. Here’s a story of something that happened to me while playing that highlights why I like this game so much:

There’s a bar where the members of a gang hang out. I’d managed to get myself into the bar, but in the course of completing a side-objective I’d alerted someone in the gang that I was up to no good, and they began trying to attack me. With nowhere to hide, I sprinted down the stairs to the main floor and flew out the front door. As I went, the number of gangsters chasing me increased. They followed me outside. Well, as it happens, outside of the club there’s a checkpoint manned by the city guard. The city guard and the gangsters were enemies, so the guards attacked the gangsters on sight, giving me room to escape, and starting a big fight between the two AI factions.

Now, that’s pretty cool on its own, but the real fun happened later. There’s another side quest that has you tail a gang member from another part of town to find out who they’re working for. So I’m darting across rooftops, trying to figure out where the gangster is going, when she walks into the intersection where the city guard and the gangsters have been fighting. The guards realise that she’s part of the gang they’re fighting with and attack her on sight, killing her, and causing me to fail my mission.

Now, this might sound bad – after all, I’d lost the ability to complete a side quest. But the way the game’s systems came together to produce a coherent, emergent narrative was so great, and it’s a perfect example of why I enjoy Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider so much.

4. Super Mario Odyssey

Patrick Klepek of Waypointdescribed Super Mario Odyssey as “a fever dream of creativity and pure joy” and that’s about as perfect a description of the game as I can think of. No game that I played in 2017, or perhaps in any recent year, made me smile as often as Mario Odyssey. People who are seriously into video games often view the height of the art form as the ability to make players cry. But I think making people sad is easy. What’s harder and more rewarding is joy, and Mario Odyssey is a game that channels every element, from its animations to its mechanics, from its sound to its structure, into joy.

If Mario Odyssey was just a game with a fun world and silly animations it would still be a good game, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a fantastic platformer, taking the formula Nintendo invented with Mario 64 and expanding upon it in some clever and inspired ways. It has a philosophy that is opposed to most big budget games in that it is absolutely packed with fun things to do. There is no filler, no unneccessary systems, no wasted time. It’s hard to run 10 feet in Mario Odyssey without finding something fun to do, some new power moon to uncover, some new test of Mario’s abilities to conquer. It follows the pattern of most recent Mario games in that almost any player could complete the main story and defeat Bowser, but there are so many optional challenges available that players of any skill level can find something compelling to keep them occupied. It’s also filled to the brim with great surprises (the twist in the moon level is a personal favourite).

I’m typically most enamored of video games with coherent worlds and compelling systems, which is why there are still three games ahead on this list, but I can easily say this for Super Mario Odyssey – it’s the game released in 2017 that made me the happiest.

3. Hitman

The Hitman episodic game was released in six parts over the course of 2016, but it wasn’t put together as a full retail package until 2017, and I didn’t play it until then, so I think it qualifies for this list. It may be surprising to see this game so high up on my list, but I’m definitely not the only one who loved it – Giant Bomb named it their Game of the Year last year. But what makes it so great? I’ll repeat what I said about Dishonored 2: “It creates a series of interlocking systems and open-ended quests that really reward you for exploring, experimenting, and understanding how the game world functions.”

Each episode in Hitman tasks you with assassinating somewhere between one to four characters who are going about their day-to-day lives across the fairly large levels. Two of the episodes also ask the player to complete one additional objective, and the second episode (Sapienza, the one pictured above) is my favourite. Each episode features a large, complicated location like an Italian villa or a luxury hotel in Thailand, and they’re full of people doing fairly normal things on fairly normal schedules. Some of those people are clearly related to the central quest, like security guards in the hotel, while others are merely there to make the environments feel more alive, like shopkeepers in Sapienza.

The fun comes primarily from two things. The first is figuring out how to reach the target(s), since they’re never just wandering down an abandoned alley where you can assassinate them with ease. Usually this will involve some combination of sneaking as well as disguises – the best way to describe Hitman is as a “social stealth” game where you’re trying to hide in plain sight. The second element that the game draws its fun from is the enormous variety of ways to interact with the world and characters. Each episode can be completed in a huge number of ways, and replaying the levels to try out different tactics is always a lot of fun. And once you’ve mastered each episode’s story campaign, there is a bunch of optional side content, like “elusive targets” with their own mini-stories that you only get once chance to complete.

Like Dishonored 2, Hitman succeeds at setting up a toybox and letting the player create their own kind of havoc inside of it.

2. Persona 5

I went back and forth between the top two games on this list a number of times. When Persona 5 is good, it’s really good. Most of my favourite games are turn-based role playing games, but it’s pretty rare to see a turn-based RPG released these days that isn’t a low-budget indie game (like The Banner Saga or Darkest Dungeon). The easiest way to describe the Persona games is that they’re like Pokemon with demons instead of cute animals, and also when you’re not delving into dungeons you play as a regular high school student doing regular high school things, like trying to deepen your friendships or spend more time with that cute girl who’s teaching you to play shogi.

Persona 5 has the best dungeon designs in the series, with each level having a great visual motif. In fact, the whole game looks outstanding, with what is possibly the best user interface design I’ve seen in a game. Everything in the game fits together, from the fonts used in the menus, to the music, to the level design, and so much more. The story also touches on some surprisingly difficult material for video games, like sexual harassment, and while Persona doesn’t always stick the landing, it does more often than not. It’s essentially a game about how rotten adults can be towards teenagers, and it’s pretty insightful about how little power teenagers really have and how easy it can be for adults to take advantage of that.

The main reason this isn’t my #1 game is that it is just too damn long. Persona 5 tells a single linear story, and that story can take something like 80-100 hours to complete. I still haven’t finished it (I’m about 2/3 of the way through). A lot of the content is just unneccessary. I can’t tell you how many times I had to sit through essentially the following conversation (dozens of times, easily):

teenager 1: we haven’t solved the problem yet!teenager 2: i’m getting really worried we haven’t solved the problem!teenager 3: guys, we’re going to solve the problem!teenager 2: but what if we don’t solve the problem?teenager 1: time is running out, we better solve the problem soon!

My other issue with the game is that it has a save system ripped out of 1994. When you’re inside the dungeons you can only save in specified “safe rooms”, and those are generally about half an hour apart. If the main character is knocked out in a battle, it’s an immediate game over, so if you walk into a battle with a new enemy and you’ve got the wrong elemental affinity, it’s easy to lose 15-20 minutes of progress with no recourse. There’s just no reason for a game released in 2017 to have this problem.

So Persona 5 is great, but flawed. If it was about 50% shorter it would have been my Game of the Year. Chrono Trigger was about 20 hours long. Final Fantasy 7 took about 35 hours. You don’t need three times that long to tell a good story.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Breath of the Wild seems to be everybody’s Game of the Year, so it’s probably no surprise that it’s also mine. I like it for the same reasons I like Dishonored and Hitman: it’s constructed from a coherent system of rules which combine in fun, often unexpected ways. If something should be able to catch fire, it can catch fire. If something should be affected by wind, it’s affected by wind. If something is metal, you can push or pull it with magnets. The systems go even further than many other similar games; for example, you can drop raw meat into a cooking pot to heat it up, making it better at improving health. But if you kill an enemy on a volcano, and the meat drops on the surface of the volcano, it cooks immediately. But you’ve got to be careful, because being on a surface as hot as a volcano is also dangerous for Link, the player character. Thankfully, the game gives you a variety of ways to deal with these situations, all of which make perfect sense systemically. For example, one way to stay warm when you’re high up on a cold mountain is to change into warmer clothes and eat a hot curry. But another way, which became my preferred way, is to simply equip a giant flaming sword. The heat from the sword keeps your body temperature up.

One of my favourite things to do in games is to just explore, and this is another area where Breath of the Wild excels. Ever since The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion was released, the idea that “if you can see a mountain off in the distance you can climb it” has been a staple in open world games, but Breath of the Wild adds one simple mechanic that makes this idea better than ever: you can climb virtually any surface in the game. You’re limited by a stamina meter, and extending the stamina meter so you can climb to increasingly inaccessible areas is one of the great joys of the game. More than anything else I played this year, Breath of the Wild makes it fun to just wander around and see what you can find.

I do wish it had proper Zelda dungeons, though.

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/games-of-2017/feed/0Screenshots of 2017http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/screenshots-of-2017/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/screenshots-of-2017/#respondTue, 19 Dec 2017 02:44:54 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=1056In recent years a growing number of games have included photo modes which let the player freeze the on-screen action and frame the perfect shot. I’ve become quite enamoured of these photo modes, which is a bit strange given how little interest I have in real photography, but so it goes. I can take dozens, sometimes even hundreds of photos in these games. I figured it would be fun to share some of my favourites as the year draws down, so what follows is a few of the ones that I think are most interesting, taken from three games that released great photo modes this year – Assassin’s Creed: Origins, No Man’s Sky, and the game I took by far the most photos in, Horizon: Zero Dawn.

(Apologies for any weird formatting in this post, the theme I’m using doesn’t seem to resize itself very well.)

ASSASSIN’S CREED: ORIGINS

NO MAN’S SKY

HORIZON: ZERO DAWN

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/12/screenshots-of-2017/feed/0Books of 2016http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/01/books-of-2016/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/01/books-of-2016/#respondMon, 02 Jan 2017 22:05:07 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=1036I’ve already posted lists for my favourite games and albums released in 2016. I don’t keep up with new book releases well enough to do a list of my favourite books released in the past year, but I do read about as many books as games I play or albums I listen to each year, so I like to do a year end round-up of what I’ve been reading around the same time I do my game and record lists.

For the previous couple of years I’ve done mini-reviews of every book I read, but it feels kind of tedious to write a few dozen reviews, and anyway I doubt more than a few people bother to read them all anyway. So this year I’ve decided just to list the 10 most compelling things I read in 2016, with no distinction between fiction and non-fiction. I hope you can find something you’ll enjoy. (The list is arranged alphabetically.)

Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe

I went on a big kick this year learning about the history of deciphering lost languages. This is the first book that I read on the subject. It differs from a lot of other books about decipherments in that Coe was one of the archaeologists involved in the effort, and he’s still alive, so he’s able to provide both expert knowledge and a first-person look at the process. The Mayan hierglyphs are fascinating because they look essentially like pictures, and so for a long time people thought they were merely symbols for whole words. It turns out that they’re actually phonetic (as is virtually every written language). Breaking the Maya Code serves as both a history of the decipherment as well as a fairly technical description of how the language was decoded, which made it thoroughly interesting to me as someone who is captivated by both language and history. There’s also an interesting Cold War angle to this, as the linguist who first proved that the symbols were phonetic was Russian, and many American & European scholars refused to believe that he was correct because they would not accept that intellectual breakthroughs could come from a communist country.

The Code Book by Simon Singh

After I’d gone through all the interesting-looking books I could find about deciphering lost languages, I thought the next logical thing to learn about was the history of code-breaking. Superficially it would seem like the two subjects should have a lot in common, but it turns out that they don’t, because code-breaking involves translating something into an already known language, whereas script decipherment does not. Anyway, this was the best book I read about code-breaking. It also serves as both a history and as a technical guide to various codes and how they’ve been broken throughout history. Singh is a talented writer, and I found the book quite enjoyable to read, though I must confess that the more it moved into modern computer-based cryptography, the harder it was for me to follow. Still, the book has lots of interesting stories and also contains examples for the reader to try their own hand at the techniques discussed.

Decade of the Wolf by Douglas Smith

In 2015 I read Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and it’s one of the most interesting books I ever read. It’s about how many non-human animals are highly social and intelligent, and how we ought to treat animals as individuals with personalities, not as indistinguishable automatons. One of the animals that gets a deep examination in that book are wolves, and in particular the wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Wolves were wiped out in much of the United States in the early 1900s, but starting in the 1990s there was an effort to reintroduce them to Yellowstone by capturing wolves in Canada and bringing them south. The program has been a remarkable success, and has had far-reaching and unexpected effects on the ecology of the region. Douglas Smith was one of the lead researchers helping to run the program, and this book is his chronicle of how wolves were reintroduced and what has happened in the years since.

The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald

Many people probably know of Eichenwald now because of his bizarre antics on Twitter during last year’s presidential election campaign, but back when I read The Informant it was the first I’d heard of him. If you’re into real life mysteries and heists this book is easy to recommend. It’s the story of how Mark Whitacre, an executive at one of the largest agricultural firms in the United States, worked as an FBI informant to help prove the existence of a massive international price-fixing scheme in the market for lysine, an additive to animal feed. That part of the story is interesting enough, but there are so many bizarre turns involving Whitacre’s character and actions that it’s hard to even know where to start. There are anonymous threatening phone calls and Nigerian e-mail scams, there’s one person who appears to be trying to act out a John Grisham novel in real life, and there are seemingly unbelievable internecine battles between and within the Justice Department and FBI over how to handle the case. This is a book I raced through because the details were just so incredible, and yet it’s all true, as chronicled in the evidence of the various criminal cases that came about as a result of Whitacre’s informing.

On The Map by Simon Garfield

A kind of popular history of map-making, including maps both real and fictional. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of cartographic history. But it’s not merely an explanation of how maps were drawn, it’s also an exploration of the culture and the ideas that combine to form the way that people in a given place and time view their own environment, both locally and globally. It’s also look at how maps have shaped other aspects of human life, from medicine to leisure, as well as how maps have changed our brains and the ways we understand the world. An entertaining look at a subject that’s mattered a great deal throughout human history.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox

Another of the more interesting books I read about lost language decipherments. There are three major decipherments in modern-ish history: Egyptian hieroglyps, Mayan hieroglyps, and an old Greek script known as Linear B. The Riddle of the Labyrinth serves as a history of the decipherment, primarily as told between the two people who did the bulk of the work: an American university professor named Alice Kober and, bizarrely, a British architect named Michael Ventris. While Ventris has long been credited with the decipherment, Kober actually did most of the heavy lifting, and this book is Fox’s attempt to give Kober the credit she’s long been denied. Fox, a journalist for the New York Times, has a Masters degree in linguistics, and so she’s able to delve into the details of the decipherment in a way that I found quite engaging. Quite an interesting story, and I love the combination of linguistics and detective work.

Saga by Brian K. Vaughan

Last year I decided that I wanted to try to get into comics and graphic novels. I’m not really sure why other than I like to learn about stuff I don’t really know about. I wasn’t enormously successful, since I don’t really have any interest in superheroes and that’s what most comics are about, but I did find a few things that were worth sticking with, and one was Saga. I’m reading the collected volumes that come out every 6 issues rather than reading it monthly, and for the most part I’ve really enjoyed it. Brian K. Vaughan is a much better writer than just about anyone else I’ve come across in comics. He writes characters that are believable, and he’s great at dialogue and pacing. Saga is the story of a couple from two warring planets who have a daughter, and mostly it’s about their attempt to raise a well-adjusted child while they’re on the run across the galaxy from all manner of threats. I do feel like the more recent volumes are losing a bit of steam, but it’s still one of the better stories I’ve read lately, and the characters are great. The art is also fantastic.

Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

The authors of this book have picked three kinds of scarcity to focus on: scarcity of money, of time, and of food (in particular, people who are on diets). According to the authors, scientific evidence suggests that the brain reacts to “scarcity” in similar ways regardless of the particular type of scarcity, so there are interesting parallels between people who don’t have enough money and people who don’t have enough time (even if they do have enough money). A lot of the book focuses on something they call “tunnelling”, which is that when you’re dealing with scarcity, the brain locks in on the thing you don’t have enough of, preventing you from thinking about other problems, which causes people to make what seem like bad decisions (for example, taking on debt they ought to know they can’t afford, or commitments they ought to know they can’t fit into a packed schedule). The upshot of this is that the only way to fix these problems is to relieve the scarcity. This book is a cross between economics, psychology, and sociologogy; the kind of thing that will likely be interesting to people who’ve liked books such as Thinking Fast and Slow.

Solarisby Stanislaw Lem

Because I spent so much time trying to find good comics to read, I didn’t get through nearly as many novels this year as I usually do, and a lot of what I read didn’t really captivate me that much. Solaris is a significant exception to that. You may have seen the George Clooney movie based on the book (or even the older Russian film), but I’d highly recommend reading the book either way. The aliens in most sci-fi are not really particularly alien; they’re actually usually just humans with a bit of different biology and culture. Solaris, on the other hand, is about truly alien extraterrestrial life. It is about the plasmic ocean of a planet called Solaris, and the ocean itself seems to be conscious. For example, it modifies its own tide to adjust its orbit. It creates grand, mysterious structures that human scientists try to study. And it creates . . . ghosts, perhaps, from the memories of the astronauts that visit it. What does it know about humans and what is it trying to say through its contact with them? Solaris is just as much a philosophical thriller as a science fiction novel, but on some levels it is better sci-fi than much of the genre because it asks more interesting questions about the parts of the universe that remain unknown. What if there is other intelligent life in the universe but humans are fundamentally incapable of understanding it? What even is intelligence if it isn’t something we can communicate with?

Unsettling Canadaby Arthur Manuel

Arthur Manuel is an First Nations rights activist in Canada. He attended law school, served for four terms as chief in his community, and has fought for aboriginal rights for several decades. Unsettling Canada discusses the history of his activism and the movements he has been involved in, from sit-ins in the 1970s to Idle No More in recent years. It’s clear from the book that Manuel is deeply skeptical of organised First Nations representation in Canada, such as the Assembly of First Nations, and believes real change comes from the grassroots, where he has worked for many years as an organiser. Manuel argues (convincingly) that the key to the welfare of First Nations people in Canada is the recognition of land title and other treaty rights. The federal and provincial governments have gone to great lengths to stonewall and prevent recognition of sovereignty or land for First Nations and continue to try to extinguish treaty rights using one-sided legal processes despite the fact that courts have made it clear that the government’s treatment is unacceptable. Manuel capably makes the case that the situation of First Nations in Canada will not improve appreciably for the long-term until the rights of aboriginal people are fully recognised.

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2017/01/books-of-2016/feed/0Music of 2016http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/12/music-of-2016/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/12/music-of-2016/#respondTue, 27 Dec 2016 15:00:39 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=1016I gave up a while ago on trying to explain what it is that I like about the music that I like. I can tell you what lyrics I enjoy, or where to find a great guitar riff, but I don’t know how to describe music except to say that it’s good. I’m reminded of something Ursula LeGuin wrote:

“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.”

These 15 albums say a lot of things with music that can not be said with words. I’ve embedded one song worth checking out from each album, though the ones on Bandcamp can be listened to in their entirety if you click through. Hope you enjoy some of them.

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/12/music-of-2016/feed/0Games of 2016http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/12/games-of-2016/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/12/games-of-2016/#respondMon, 26 Dec 2016 16:28:59 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=9952016 was one of the best years for gaming that I can remember. There were surprising indie success stories and big budget sequels that really delivered. There were great strategy and sports games, fantastic RPGs, and, uh, whatever Stardew Valley is.

I’ve listed the 10 best games that I played this year, but there are a bunch I haven’t even gotten to that look or sound like they’re probably a lot of fun; Final Fantasy 15 is downloading on my Playstation 4 as I type this all up.

The one exception to this list is that I haven’t included any sports games because I find it hard to figure out how to rank an annual iteration of an essentially completed game. Is this year’s version of NHL or Madden a “new” game if most of the code is recycled from previous editions? If I did include sports games, FIFA 17 would definitely be on this list. It’s probably the game I sunk the most hours into this year, and I’ve had a lot of fun with the standard career mode, as well as the really well-executed story mode called The Journey.

Anyway, here are some cool games.

10. Overcooked

If you own a game console with multiple controllers and you have at least one friend, you should play Overcooked. It’s a madcap game of cooperative cooking that has you scrambling around kitchens with absurd configurations to try and get meals out to hungry customers. It’s got the two things that make for the best co-op games: it’ll make you laugh, and you can’t possibly succeed unless you communicate and work together. It’s a game that requires you to talk and plan with the people on the couch beside you if you want to have any chance of victory. Also there are spaceships and volcanoes and stuff.

9. Firewatch

I’m of two minds about Firewatch, which is why it’s a bit further down this list than it otherwise might have been. The basic premise of the game – middle-aged man decides to spend a summer in a national park to get away from his crumbling personal life – is much more interesting than typical video game fare. The writing is frequently excellent, which isn’t surprising since the creative leads on Firewatch were also behind the fantastic first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead game. And boy is this ever a nice game to look at. The lack of enemies or violence means you can really take your time to soak it all in.

But part-way through the game takes a really weird turn into a murder mystery/conspiracy theory angle that feels completely at odds with the spirit of the game, and it pulled me out of the experience. It resolves in an unsatisfying way with multiple major plot holes. So, as I say, I’m torn here. Some of the core elements of the game work perfectly, and there’s a lot to like, but the unnecessary diversions in the plot make it hard to like as much as I want to.

8. Uncharted 4

I definitely did not like Uncharted 4 as much as Uncharted 3, but it’s still a fun experience. The levels in general feel less creative and less like action movie set pieces. And some of the new things they added in, like the driveable four-wheeler, don’t really add much to the experience. It’s interminably slow at the beginning, but the pace does pick up nicely once the story really gets going.

Like the other Uncharteds, it’s one of the prettiest looking games you’ll play any time soon. The photo mode is solid, and lets you take great looking pictures like the one above, which I took myself. The platforming sections have been improved over previous Uncharted games, as they now require more skill and some careful navigation by the player. And the general pace of exploring and fighting is still well put together.

Also, the epilogue is very good.

7. XCom 2

I didn’t put nearly as much time into XCom 2 as I would have liked to. It builds on the first game in some satisfying ways, and the ability to customise the appearance of your soldiers, sometimes in quite amusing ways, really helped me care about them more than the soldiers in the first game. I think making the player part of an underground resistance movement is also more interesting than the previous game’s structure, which had you leading a global military resistance. The combat remains compelling, with some improvements on the first game.

There are a couple of things I dislike, though. The first is the turn limit in a lot of levels, which feels like it runs contrary to the most interesting ways to play. The other is that some of the levels are pretty long, easily half an hour or more, which makes losing and replaying them a huge pain. Still, overall a fun game that improves on an already good predecessor.

6. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Mankind Divided builds on what the previous Deus Ex game built in a mostly satisfying way. While the screenshots and trailers seem to suggest it’s a high-tech action game with lots of shootouts and fancy explosions, the actual pace is much more slow and thoughtful (at least, it is when I play; you can run around shooting at everything if you want). The most interesting parts of the game are the more open-world-ish sections where you spend more time doing detective work than engaging with enemies. The architecture and city design is a big step up over the previous Deus Ex, and the environments are a lot of fun to explore. Most of the best parts of the game are in the side-quests, which often send you exploring the central city of the game and feel more connected to the world than many of the story missions.

There are a couple of downsides, though. One is that almost all of the central story levels involved segments in large indoor environments with large numbers of enemies that are almost impossible to complete without engaging violently. Since I try and play a stealthy no-kill style of game, that’s not very interesting! (Aside: I did finish the game with zero kills). Another problem is that the story is just not very interesting. The writing is pretty bad in a lot of places, and the ham-fisted allegory to the U.S. civil rights movement completely fall flat. If “augmented” humans really existed, as they might one day, they would likely be rich and powerful, not an oppressed minority. The game really misses a chance to explore more interesting questions about the relationship between power and technology.

5. Civilization 6

It’s hard for me to place a Civilization game on a list like this. It’s only been out for a couple of months, and I’ve only finished two games, which isn’t nearly enough time to get a handle on a historical strategy game. So it’s entirely possible that, if I look back on this list a couple of years from now, this game will be closer to the top of the list if it really grows on me, as Civ games tend to do.

But even right now I’m definitely enjoying my time with it. I’m already prepared to say I prefer it to Civilization V. The new element of the game where you place some of your buildings (and all your wonders) on specific tiles is a nice change to the formula, though I do wish they’d gone a bit further and made everything you build take up a specific tile. I think the map generation is the best it’s been in any Civ game, with landscapes that look natural and appropriately require you to value terrain, especially sources of water.

My biggest complaint so far is that the AI is just not that good at playing the game, and in particular the way religious units work seems to need an overhaul. The two patches they’ve released so far have already improved the game, so I’m hopeful that it’ll keep getting better over time. I’m also not a huge fan of the way the tech tree has been split in two, which seems to significantly reduce the importance of scientific research. And like Civ V (and Civ IV after its expansions), it continues the trend in Civilization games towards adding a lot of extra numbers to keep track in a way that increases the busy work but doesn’t add much tactical depth.

4. Stardew Valley

You run a farm. It’s really good. I’m not really sure what else to say. I’m sure you’ve heard about Stardew Valley by now. I played it a ton when it first came out.

OK, here’s something specific that I like about it: you really feel the passage of time in a way that very few games manage to capture. The progression through the seasons changes up the gameplay in a nice way, and the cycle of festive events around the town really helps to make it feel like time is really passing. It made me a bit wistful in that sense.

3. Dishonored 2

Any of the final three games on this list could easily be #1. They’re all games that I loved from start to finish. The first Dishonored had some neat ideas and started off very strong, but about half-way through the game (after the mansion party level) it really loses steam. Dishonored 2, on the other hand, takes the promise of the first game and fulfills it. The level design is fantastic. The architecture is gorgeous. The abilities are fun to use. The levels can all be completed in a variety of ways, from a variety of angles, with a variety of play styles. I had a blast playing Dishonored 2.

If I had to have a criticism I guess the actual plot is not very interesting, but it mostly just serves as an excuse to send you travelling through the city’s environs.

2. No Man’s Sky

A lovely game about the loneliness of exploring a vast, beautiful universe.

Everything I said about the first Banner Saga back when I declared it my favourite game of 2014 remains true. It’s the game(s) that fixed so many of my complaints about other role-playing games. The most important element for me is that it isn’t a power fantasy. You aren’t amassing an army or an incredible arsenal of abilities to overthrow a cartoon villain like in most RPGs. Instead, you’re leading a band of refugees fleeing from an opponent so powerful that you can’t hope to fight back against it, all the while hoping that you’ll eventually reach someone else who can save you.

The original game had a clever combat system that works like this: all characters have an armor rating and a health rating. Any regular attack is first absorbed by armor, with any remaining damage dealt to health (so an attack of 7 against an armor of 5 would deal 2 damage). But instead of attacking health, you can attack armor to reduce it so that the next character who attacks that opponent has an easier time breaching their defences. The twist is that health is also attack power, which considerably shapes your tactics.

That combat system was good in the first Banner Saga, but the battles were fairly repetitive, with minimal enemy variety and not a lot of options for your own party. That issue, which was the only real problem in the first game, is completely fixed here, as enemy variety is considerably increased, as is the number of options available in forming your own party and tactics. It takes what was already a great game and made it even better. It’s close to flawless, which is why The Banner Saga has quickly become one of my favourite RPGs of all time, right up there with classics like Chrono Cross or Suikoden V.

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/12/games-of-2016/feed/0The Joy of Discoveryhttp://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/08/the-joy-of-discovery/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/08/the-joy-of-discovery/#respondWed, 24 Aug 2016 01:24:06 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=988I’m part of the first generation that really grew up with video games, I think. I got an NES for Christmas when I was five years old, not too long after I first played Super Mario Bros. at a friend’s birthday party, so video games have been part of my life nearly as far back as my memories go. I’ve owned something like a dozen consoles and handhelds over the past few decades, not to mention hundreds of games, so it’s easy to say that games have played a fairly central role in my life.

Among the hundreds of games that I’ve played, there are a handful – maybe 10, maybe 15 – that stand out in my mind because of a particular kind of impact they had on me. These aren’t necessarily my favourite games. What they are is games that provided me with an experience that felt really new and unique and powerful. They’re games that have stuck with me primarily because there was an incredible feeling of discovery that went along with playing them, especially the very first time I picked up a controller and spent some time with them.

The first game I can remember giving me that sensation was Super Mario 64. Before the Nintendo 64 was released, Nintendo set up demo stations in department stores across North America. One day I was in the local Zellers when I happened across one of these displays. The whole thing felt bizarre. The controller had an “analog stick” that was nothing like the cross-shaped directional pad I had grown up using to move characters around on the screen. There was a button underneath the joystick, which felt strange. And the controller had three handles, so you couldn’t even access all of the buttons at once; how bizarre! Even the controller felt like it was setting me up for an alien experience. But it couldn’t match the strange joy of playing the game.

I think almost anyone who grew up playing video games in the 1980s and early 90s remembers what it was like the first time they played Mario 64. I’m not sure I can really describe it adequately, because in order to understand how strange and wondrous it seemed, you have to know what it was like for that kind of experience to not exist. Before Mario 64 nearly all games had 2D graphics and movement, and the shift to a 3D world was remarkable. Even more amazing, perhaps, is that Nintendo nailed it on the first try. Mario 64 is a really, really good game, even today.

Playing Mario 64 for the first time was a remarkable experience. There was nothing that could possibly have prepared me for what it would be like to play. I’d read articles about it and seen screenshots, but none of that really conveys the huge jump in possibilities that was made possible by the jump from 2D to 3D. Playing Mario 64 blew me away because it was something completely new and surprising.

Since then there have been a small number of games to have a similar effect. Most of them are from that mid-to-late 90s era: Wave Race 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy 7 all gave me surprising experiences that filled me with wonder because they were so unlike anything I’d played before.

In more recent years there have been a lot fewer games capable of having that effect on me (Metal Gear Solid 4 stands out as one noteworthy exception). Part of that is age; games like Metal Gear Solid or Wave Race came out when the number of games that I’d played was much smaller, as were my life experiences in general. But I think another part of it is that games have become very standardised. In the 80s and, to a lesser degree, the 90s, there weren’t a lot of clearly defined genres or conventions in gaming, so developers were creating games without trying to fit them into rigidly defined boundaries. Over the past 10-15 years, however, there’s been a real dilution in the variety of games available, at least as far as big budget console games are concerned. The most obvious example of this is first-person shooters, which all play like other first-person shooters, right down to the controls.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’ve finally played another game that gave me that feeling – No Man’s Sky. Booting it up for the first time felt, fittingly, like an alien experience. I had some idea what the game would entail, of course, since I’d been watching trailers and gameplay videos of it for two years prior to its release. But I didn’t know what it would feel like to play. I know what a shooter feels like to play. I know what a role-playing game feels like to play. But I didn’t know what No Man’s Sky would feel like to play, what kinds of emotions it would trigger or how my inputs would help create them.

It’s a game that’s filled me with awe on more occasions than possibly anything else I’ve played. The first time I flew over a procedurally generated planet was awesome. The first time I broke into the upper reaches of a planet’s atmosphere and saw the whole thing from outer space was awesome. The first time it really struck me just how unfathomably huge the procedurally generated universe turned out to be was awesome. The first time I landed on a space station was awesome. The first time I landed on a moon and gazed up in the sky at the overbearing spectre of the nearby planet was awesome. And so many other moments that I don’t even want to share because they could spoil the fun of getting to see them for yourself for the first time.

No Man’s Sky isn’t the best game I’ve ever played. But it is a game that let me feel a kind of wonder that has been increasingly rare as I’ve gotten older, and for the way it has transported me back to a younger self who felt like there was an enormous and scary and wonderful universe out there to discover, I’m incredibly thankful.

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/08/the-joy-of-discovery/feed/0Reflections On Mythbustershttp://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/03/reflections-on-mythbusters/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/03/reflections-on-mythbusters/#respondMon, 21 Mar 2016 21:42:13 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=976Mythbusters aired its final episode recently. That seems to mark a good time to talk about why it was such a great show.

As I was watching the final episode of Mythbusters, I noticed that it hit me kind of hard. That seemed weird to me. Other shows I’ve really enjoyed have aired their final episodes in recent years (30 Rock and Parks and Recreation, for example), but I haven’t had much of an emotional reaction to their finales. I think the main reason my reaction was different this time is that Mythbusters starred real people. When a sitcom goes off the air, you’re not saying goodbye to Tina Fey or Amy Poehler, you’re saying goodbye to some fictional character who doesn’t exist outside the space of that show. Those characters were always gone, in a sense, every time the show ended.

But the Mythbusters were real people, and because the show was on air for so long (13 years), viewers got to watch them age in something approaching real time. Now that the show’s gone, we’re not saying goodbye to characters so much as we’ve witnessed the ending of a long chapter in the lives of real people. Obviously I don’t actually know any of them on any meaningful level, but for some reason it still feels like leaving friends behind when you changed jobs or move to a new city or anything like that. And because the people are real, the time they’ve given feels more real too. They’re all 13 years older now than when the show debuted. So am I. And 13 years is a lot of your life to say goodbye to.

What made Mythbusters so good? Part of the appeal was that it was a show about nerds; and I mean that it was really about them. The Big Bang Theory gets talked about as a sign of the mainstreaming of nerd-dom, but it’s not really a show about nerds at all. What it is is a show about laughing at stereotypes about nerds. Mythbusters, on the other hand, wasn’t using the nerdiness of its hosts as a set-up to laugh at them, but as a cool thing to aspire to. The Mythbusters were weird and quirky and smart and awesome.

Being a Mythbuster is pretty much my dream job. Not because of any particular thing they did or any particular skill they expressed; I have absolutely no knowledge of electrical engineering or welding or pretty much any of the kinds of activities they got up to. No, it’s my dream job because it was about always having something new to learn.

Most jobs eventually become rote. It’s basically the nature of a job that no matter how interesting it is when you start, eventually you’re going to be doing the same kinds of things an awful lot. There’s not much of a way around the fact that going to the same place for 8 hours every week day for years on end is going to involve some level of drudgery. But what the Mythbusters got to do every day was learn how to do something new, and then go out and do that new, exciting thing. And then go do another new, exciting thing. And another. That’s really what I want out of life – constant discovery.

As I’ve been thinking about Mythbusters, I’ve realised that one of its primary appeals is something that it has in common with my other favourite TV show, the British comedy panel game QI. What’s at the core of both of those shows, I think, is the idea that it’s fun to be surprised. In a sense, part of what those shows are about is letting you know that you’re wrong, and you’re going to learn something interesting about how and why you’re mistaken. That ethos is really strongly opposed to almost all media, which is about reassuring you that you’re right. QI even has a round called General Ignorance, which is about things that are commonly believed to be true, but aren’t. I think it’s much more compelling to be willing to admit that you’re wrong – indeed, to expect that you’ll sometimes turn out to be wrong – and to still pursue the truth because it’s a worthwhile endeavour even if it makes you feel a bit silly.

Mythbusters was like that too. One of the most interesting parts of Mythbusters is that I would often see the results of something they’d been testing, and say “I never would have predicted that!” I love things that I never would have predicted! Life is much more exciting when you discover how much of it you still have left to discover. And I think that’s a really big part of why Mythbusters was so fascinating. It wasn’t just a show about knowledge (anyone can make a boring documentary based on existing research). Rather, it was a show about learning; about putting our ideas about the world to the test, then observing the results and adjusting as necessary. That’s very rare in television, but it was unique and exciting, and I’m sad that it exists no longer.

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/03/reflections-on-mythbusters/feed/0The Social Cost Of Getting An Educationhttp://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/03/the-social-cost-of-getting-an-education/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/03/the-social-cost-of-getting-an-education/#respondFri, 11 Mar 2016 14:30:04 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=973When I was growing up, the importance of getting a university education was strongly impressed upon me. This wasn’t a family thing – I was, as far as I know, the first person in my family on either my mother or father’s side to get a degree. But I was told, by family, educators, and the media that if I wanted to get a good job when I grew up, I should go to university. At any rate, I finished high school with no real desire to do the kind of work that was available to me, so off to university I went.

It wound up being simpler and less expensive to move to the city I was attending school in rather than commuting, so that’s what I did. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I decided I wanted to go to grad school, so I moved again. After I finished my MA, my girlfriend at the time (who I’m still with) was about to start her PhD in another city, so I moved there with her. I wasn’t getting very good work opportunities there, so I moved once more, to Ottawa, where I still reside a few years later.

While I got one more degree than many people do, I suspect my story sounds somewhat familiar to most people who have gone to university, and especially to anyone who has done graduate work. You move around, get settled, then move around some more. Hopefully at some point you find a place you can actually stay, or you just get tired of packing your stuff up and decide you’re sticking around whether the city is working or not. Not only is this story pretty common, it’s what you’re told to expect. If you can’t find work in one place, you’re supposed to go find work somewhere else.

People often talk about the career sacrifices they make for family; how they got offered a great job somewhere other than where they currently were, and how they held back their career because it didn’t work for the other member(s) of their family. But we don’t really talk about a much more common trade-off, which is that we sacrifice our friendships and our social networks to advance our careers.

When I graduated high school, some of my friends moved away to other cities to go on to university, while some went to a school closer to home (virtually everyone I was friends with in high school went to university somewhere). That cut my peer group quite substantially. When I moved to a new city to be closer to my university, it became harder to keep up friendships with friends back home, but I picked up a new group in the new town.

Then people started graduating and moving away again. Before too long I decided to go to grad school, so I moved again too. Grad school was only a year for me, so there wasn’t much time to forge friendships.

When I moved with my girlfriend so that she could continue her studies, I made new friends in the new city again. I started working and made some friends there, in addition to other contacts we had who introduced us to other people around town.

Then I moved once again, this time because I got offered a much better job here in Ottawa. So I left another group of friends behind (two distinct groups, really), and had to start forging new friendships all over again.

Over the course of roughly a decade, I ended up going through about five distinct groups of friends, forging bonds only for them to become hard to keep up shortly thereafter. And that’s really difficult to do. It’s true that it was my own decision to move in many cases, but I was doing what I’d always been told I had to do: get more educated, find better work, go wherever that takes you. It’s a rotten way of being. But so too is not having enough money to pay your bills, a situation I’m only too familiar with.

It might be easy to say that I’m just in a weird situation and getting educated and employed isn’t normally so hard on friendships, but I don’t think that’s true. I know that within my various friend groups, the same thing has happened to almost everyone else. In every city I’ve lived in, other people have moved on to other places for work and school too. If I were to go back to any of those places (as I do, occasionally), I would find that almost no one I knew there was left. Everyone else moved on to get more educated or more employed, too. They all made the same sacrifices I did.

We also know, from social science research, that these kinds of problems are getting more common. Researchers are growing concerned over the “loneliness epidemic” as an ever-growing number of people report feeling lonely or socially isolated, and associated health problems are on the rise. While no one who I know of has specifically researched the link between friendships and moving for work or school, they are among the risk factors according to researchers; additionally, loneliness is on a faster rise among the young than the old.

I like to wrap up anything I write with some kind of clean conclusion, but I’m not sure I have one here. I just think it’s a problem we don’t really talk about, and one that’s affected me, so I wanted to talk about it. If I have any take-away, I suppose it’s this:

We under-estimate how damaging social dislocation can be, both in our own lives and in those of others. It’s just assumed that people are always willing and able to go wherever work is most plentiful. And beyond that, anyone who complains is seen as being lazy and not sufficiently committed to work. But that’s a very troubling way of thinking about work and, more importantly, other humans. The economy should work for people and not the other way around. I don’t have any grand suggestions for how to fix this problem, but friendships and social connections matter, and we should not undervalue them.

]]>http://greatapes.ca/blog/2016/03/the-social-cost-of-getting-an-education/feed/0Games of 2015http://greatapes.ca/blog/2015/12/games-of-2015/
http://greatapes.ca/blog/2015/12/games-of-2015/#respondSun, 27 Dec 2015 15:00:32 +0000http://greatapes.ca/blog/?p=956This is my 3rd (and final) look back on media I enjoyed this year, after music and books. There are probably games released in 2015 that you liked that I didn’t include in my list. Here’s the reason:

1. The game is Undertale – I haven’t played it yet.

2. The game is not Undertale – I played it and it was terrible. Or I didn’t know it existed. Or I’m waiting for it to go on sale. Or you just made the name of a game up to test my hipster cred and now you look mighty foolish, don’t you?

Last year there were 7 games that I liked best. Coincidentally, there are 7 this year too. Or maybe it’s not a coincidence and this is some Book of Revelations thing. At least we’ve got a rapture to look forward to.

7. Broken Age

Broken Age is the game that made Kickstarter for video games a thing. Sure, small projects had used the service before, but with this game Tim Schafer made it possible for more ambitious projects from established developers to crowd-fund their games. Thankfully the game wasn’t just influential on the business side; it’s a good game too. Pitched as an old-school puzzle/adventure game of the kind that Schafer broke into the industry making, Broken Age tried, mostly successfully, to carry the banner for a genre that has largely vanished from major game studios.

The game wound up being split in two, and it’s unfortunate that each half has different strengths that the other would have benefitted from. The first act sets up an emotionally-engaging story about two teenagers trying to assert their own identities among families who try to control them. It didn’t have very interesting puzzles, though. The second act has much better puzzles, but largely abandons the personal stories of the first act in favour of some weird thing about aliens. Still, it’s a game I enjoyed almost all the way through, and the art is absolutely gorgeous. My screen-shot doesn’t do it justice, you really need to see it in motion, in full-screen, in high resolution.

The production of the game was captured in a documentary series, which is fantastic, and is available entirely free on Youtube (it was originally released to Kickstarter backers in pieces over the course of development).

6. Cities: Skylines

Probably the best Sim City game ever made, even though it’s not Sim City. Do you like building things? Cities, in particular? Do you like laying out roads and designing districts and increasing a region’s literacy level and decreasing its unemployment? To some people that probably sounds really boring! But if you are interested in those kinds of things, you’d have a blast playing Cities: Skylines.

5. Fallout 4

It might be surprising that Fallout 4 is this far down my list, since I suspect it will be many peoples’ favourite game of the year. I have sort of mixed feelings about it. It’s often a very good game. It looks fantastic; Bethesda have really upped their presentation game. I really liked the scavenging stuff, which gave a gameplay-related reason to search through the game’s many spaces. I love exploring spaces in games, and anything Bethesda makes is great for that.

And yet, it’s hard to ignore the game’s significant flaws. The biggest problem is that it’s not really a role playing game at all any more. It’s basically an open-world action game with experience points. There’s not really much room to develop an individual character, either from a gameplay or narrative standpoint. You’re always going to wind up playing as someone who solves every problem by shooting things in the face. And I thought the world-building was far less interesting than in Fallout 3 or Skyrim. The Commonwealth feels like a bunch of unrelated places that just happen to be close by.

I enjoyed Fallout 4 quite a bit for the first 2/3 of my time with it, but the longer I stayed with it, the hollower the experience started to feel, and the ending (I sided with The Institute) was lazy, kind of boring, and didn’t really resolve anything (except that there were a lot more dead people).

4. Rocket League

Rocket League is soccer/hockey with race cars. That sounds dumb, and for a while I ignored this game because it just didn’t sound very interesting. But I kept hearing how great it is, so eventually I caved and bought it. And boy, were people right – it’s an incredibly fun game. It’s hard to describe exactly what’s so fun about it, though the physics, a weird mix of floaty and precise, are surely a part of it. There’s no randomness in the game (as far as I know), so it’s easy to see yourself improving as you figure out how the physics work. The short game lengths (just 5 minutes) mean it doesn’t feel like a slog if you’re losing because another game is just around the corner. It also lends itself well to teamwork between strangers because it doesn’t require much coordination and it’s simple enough that it’s easy to see where you’re needed. I rarely play online multiplayer with strangers, but with Rocket League it was easy and fun to do.

3. Massive Chalice

It might be surprising that I’ve got Massive Chalice ahead of games like Fallout 4 because it wasn’t a game that many people talked about this year, but I had a blast with it. Think of it as a XCom with a sense of humour in terms of how it plays for the battles, and mix that with a bit of Crusader Kings with a sense of humour for the overworld section. I’m a big fan of games with tactical RPG-ish combat, and the battles are fun in this. The part that really makes it shine, though, is the overworld, where you have to manage the training and succession of several royal families over 300 years. Trying to manage your bloodlines to ensure that you have better troops, teachers, etc. in the future, while potentially risking the lives of your best soldiers to win fights in the present is a great challenge. This is probably the first game I’ve played with permadeath for characters where it felt like a natural part of the game. Everyone dies eventually anyway (life expectancy is about 50-60 outside of combat), so if you lose someone in combat a few years ahead of that, it feels like part of the story you’re building rather than a major setback.

Anyway, if “XCom, but funny” doesn’t sell you on this game, I don’t know what would.

2. Shadowrun: Hong Kong

This is the third straight year I’ve had a Shadowrun RPG at #2 on my best-of-the-year list. I think this one might be my favourite of the three, all of which were funded by Kickstarters and made by a team lead by the man who created Shadowrun (he also created BattleTech and HeroClix, which is a pretty impressive run). Like the other recent Shadowrun games, Hong Kong is set in a cyberpunk future Earth where some humans have had a magical awakening. It has turn-based tactical combat in the vein of XCom, and you build a team of ‘runners to tackle the dirty work of various corporations in an effort to gain the information that you need to track down your missing father.

While Shadowrun: Hong Kong is built in the same engine as the others, there are a few reasons I like it best of the bunch. For one, it has the most interesting story. It’s also much better paced, both from a story and gameplay standpoint. They’ve also made some key fixes to the combat, like simplifying armor and cover, that make it more fun to play. I definitely recommend picking this up if you’re into RPGs. It is a stand-alone game that requires no knowledge of the previous two, but those are worth playing too.

1. Metal Gear Solid 5

Metal Gear Solid 5 is a game where you can have a helicopter ride into the middle of a battlefield and rain down hellfire on your enemies while it blasts The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love” from a P.A. system, and then whisks you and your dog away while the chorus hits. I guess it’s a game where lots of other stuff happens, too.

I’m a huge fan of the Metal Gear Solid series. They’re hugely inventive and they have some of the most interesting stories in gaming. Well, all of them except MGS5, which has a story that’s pretty obviously unfinished. And what’s there of the story feels pretty hacked together. It’s clear that virtually the entire second half of the game was cut, but even the first half ends abruptly. From a story-telling standpoint, this is easily the worst Metal Gear Solid.

From a gameplay standpoint, though, it’s great. It’s called “open-world”, but I think of it more like “open mission”. There’s no real “world” in the broader sense of the term, but there is a large, relatively open space within which you get a lot of options for how to tackle your objectives. It’s like last year’s great Shadow of Mordor in that regard. The main story missions are just so intricately and carefully constructed, at least in the 1st act where the content seems to be finished. You get a huge variety of tools and tactics at your disposal, and it’s fun to mix and match on different missions, trying out different techniques and approaches.

One thing that I really like about this game is how smart it is about scaling. This is a topic I intend to write a full blog post about in the future, but I’ll explain it in short. In a lot of games, you’re told you’re a big hero with an army at his/her disposal, but you end up doing all the grunt work yourself while your soldiers just stand around. Dragon Age: Inquisition was particularly bad about this. But in MGS5, the larger your private military corporation gets, the more of the work that you did early on in the game can be passed on to your underlings. It’s a really smart design that lets the game throw a lot at you without requiring you to micromanage constantly. Other games (especially RPGs) should learn from this.